Clues to the lives of North America’s first inhabitants are hidden underwater | Hacker News Reader

Clues to the lives of North America’s first inhabitants are hidden underwater

smithsonianmag.com

70 pointsBrajeshwar35 comments

I was listening to an archaeology professor not long ago. He was challenging the long-standing hypothesis that human migration came across the Bering straight and then moved inland early on, populating the inner North American continent.

He postulated that the migration initially moved down along the West Coast quite a ways before moving inland. He suggested that we initially thought inland because that's where we find so many artifacts. But we forget that the coastline of the time period may have been as much as 400ft lower than today, thus so much of the archaeological artifacts are either lost or unknown to us today. Because we only have access to what was not submerged below sea level rise, we have an incomplete (and, apparently misguided) impression of what really happened.

Some of the oldest human remains (possibly the oldest) in North America are actually on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, California. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Springs_Man

For a good few years people who were personally offended at the idea the Clovis culture wasn't North America's first inhabitants wielded a great deal of power in the scientific community. Thankfully that's basically over.

This is the answer, IMO, and we are still dealing with the last of their generation for the next ten years or so.

> Some of the oldest human remains (possibly the oldest) in North America are actually on Santa Rosa Island

There are several sites indicating human presence in North America 20 000 - 30 000 years ago, inferred from campsites and broken animal bones. And in one case, human footprints:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fossil-fo...

And then there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site

But none of these very old sites contain remains of human bones.

And don't forget whatever hominin was responsible for the cerrutti Mastodon site near San Diego... Almost certainly this hominin live near the coast and the evidence of it is almost all gone now

The shell midden I'm linking to is much, much more recent, but I do wonder if something like a buried-in-sediment offshore midden of similar type is the sort of evidence that would could theoretically find (relatively) easily if we started looking at submerged historic coastline in earnest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaleback_Shell_Midden

It's incredibly unlikely that any hominins were responsible for Cerutti. McNabb [1] wrote a good article looking at what hominins could plausibly have created the site given what's known from elsewhere and the evidence that's been presented. The short answer is that there weren't any plausible candidates and most of the technologies necessary wouldn't be invented until modern humans did so long after the site is dated. The academic consensus on the original paper is is that it presented a genuinely ambiguous site where the authors simply overstated the strength of their argument because they were unfamiliar with modern analytical methodologies at the time.

[1] https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.52

I was convinced of that, when that guy(?) went down the west coast in a kayak one summer, starting in alaska and ending in Baja California. If he could do it, then early Americans could do it.

And the next summer, after finding an entire uninhabited paradise with plentiful game and oysters and beautiful rivers, bring the spouse and start a family.

Who wouldn't?

I wasn't aware this was even controversial. The question highlights how one can choose to answer on the basis of data or on the basis of reasoning.

In this and many other areas it seems that people place a priority on data driven answers opposed to logic driven ones. Part of the challenge has to do with scientific publishing. These days database results are much more likely to be published then well thought out but entirely conceptual results

The Chumash people, who lived both on the mainland and on Santa Rosa island, had a myth, if I remember correctly, that their people had come from somewhere else across a rainbow bridge. Of course I don't believe that there was a literal rainbow bridge, but I interpret it as a cultural subconsciousness of having originally come across the ocean. Their seafaring practices and boat construction were actually fairly advanced in contrast to other tribes on the west coast. If the Polynesians traveled as far through the Pacific as they did, it doesn't seem farfetched that humans could have reached the Americas without crossing the Bearing Strait. Just my hypothesis.

The chumash are genetically very close to other American Indian peoples, who are collectively related to historic groups that populated Northeast Asia. Both land and sea voyages from Asia to the Americas are reasonable mainstream hypotheses given current evidence, but they're both commonly called "crossing the Bering strait".

A transpacific voyage from somewhere like southeast Asia may have been theoretically possible, but there's no actual evidence that the first settlers of the Americas came that way and quite a lot of evidence that they didn't.

There’s genetic evidence that Polynesians reached South America, FWIW, so not just theoretically possible.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/polynesians-south-americans-...

The Polynesians were also some the greatest navigators in human history, with thousands of years of cultural heritage centered around long distance maritime exploration. They're not exactly a good point of comparison for "what was realistically achievable for humans tens of thousands of years ago" in the same way Olympic athletes aren't.

Yes, absolutely - I think I misunderstood your comment and where the uncertainty was applied.

How could there be evidence that they didn’t?

Because of parsimony, evidence for one theory is also evidence against another. We have a patchy record of debitage and ancient DNA stretching from Siberia across Beringia and down into continental North America. We can actually directly map the broad spread of humans out of Africa and around the world with things like the serial founder effect, and it points to a migration around the Pacific rim contributing most of indigenous ancestry.

None of this completely rules out alternative hypotheses (and indeed you can't), but it's evidence against them and suggests that they're either unlikely or insignificant.

>but there's no actual evidence ...

Yes, believe the point being that evidence remains undiscovered and underwater...

I find it interesting that as a child, some of the books that I read about human colonization of the Americas distinctly mentioned this, and a few of these books were from the 1960's. So at least some Soviet historians had this idea quite a while ago.

That's not exactly avant-garde; the coastal migration hypothesis has been the dominant hypothesis among anthropologists since the early 90s.

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496202178/ may or may not interest yall

Also relevant: Beringia[0]. The huge area of land between Russia and Alaska that has since been covered in water. When people talk about a land bridge between the two, it's not like it was a small narrow bit above the waves that you quickly crossed. It was the size of a country!

> Commencing from c. 57,000 YBP, steppe–tundra vegetation dominated large parts of Beringia with a rich diversity of grasses and herbs. There were patches of shrub tundra with isolated refugia of larch and spruce forests with birch and alder trees. It has been proposed that the largest and most diverse megafaunal community residing in Beringia at this time could only have been sustained in a highly diverse and productive environment.

There are archeological treasures down below those waters that could tell us so much about the history of the first peoples to come to North America.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia

Let me introduce you to the Laurentide ice sheet [1]. It was similar to the ice sheets that now cover Greenland and Antarctica and was up to 2 miles thick in places, extending far south into what is now the US.

After being around for ~2.5 million years it melted about 20,000 years ago. Prior to then sea levels were ~130 meters lower than they are now. Think about that. There was still various land bridges that allowed migration. We see direct evidence of this. It's why, for example, we find archaeological sites under the English Channel (eg [2]).

So our ancestors like migrated along and settled on coasts and rivers. Obviously we have a lot of evidence along rivers because they weren't inundanted by 130m of water but the coasts were. So that means a lot of that evidence was simply erased. We always have to take that gap into account (eg an inland people from Siberia migrating to North America will have had all of its coastal history erased so the first we'll see of them is when they advanced to the point of settling inland).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet

[2]: https://www.livescience.com/1759-stone-age-settlement-englis...

I just played around with https://www.floodmap.net/ and it's pretty crazy what -130 meters looks like. Argentina and China have massive coastal growth and the Sea of Japan becomes landlocked. How much history is 100 miles off China's modern day coast line?

Somewhat related. It’s super weird walking around the desert in Palm Springs, over an hour from the ocean/LA, and there are seashells all over the place mixed into the sand. It’s very rare that I’ve experienced something so anachronistic, it made me feel the passage of time on a scale that was very unusually large.

We used to find seashell fossils in Iowa where I went to college just out on the ground surface. Mind blowing stuff for sure.

A friend told me another REALLY weird fact.

If you dig a hole below the water table in most places a pond will form. And left alone for a while, fish will appear in it. This happens most anywhere.

edit: also: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Phaneroz...

How can I learn more about this?

Some interesting discussion here:

http://forum.nanfa.org/index.php/topic/12401-spontaneous-reg...

> Dated to at least 12,200 years ago, it’s the earliest documented site of human activity in the southeastern U.S.

Kinda weird referring to these people in the southeast as being America's first inhabitants when there were already people living on the continent for thousands of years before that. I suspect that people may forget that there was not one single wave of migration by one single group of people who remained a coherent group for two hundred centuries or so.

cf. https://www.pnas.org/post/podcast/peopling-americas

It's impossible to rule out all possibility of one-of human semi-circumnavigation in pre-history, either through boatmaking or unique natural circumstances. H. sapiens neanderthalensis may have even beat us h. sapiens sapiens to water transportation.

Mass migration, OTOH, needs motivating factors such as curiosity, opportunity, or existential threat, and is more difficult to navigate the young, old, infirm, and the naïve through dangerous travels.

Europe, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

Why is human history so interesting?

A non-rhetorical A to a rhetorical Q: Narcissistic anthropocentrism.

Because it's about us, which in an of itself is going to be reason enough for some people.

Have there been any wide scale archaeological explorations of doggerland between England and France? I’ve always wondered what is down there from when it was above sea level in ancient times.

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